Over the course of the past two decades, the business world has shifted for small and medium sized businesses just as much as for major corporations. Across all spectra of the commercial world, managers and owners have come to understand that one of their most vital assets of all is something that, at heart, is not physical in nature: information resources in the form of data.

Even though data is not essentially a physical entity, it requires a physical apparatus to store it. Even in today's highly virtualized world, there is still a physical component at the heart of data storage. This is true for both data that is actively in use and for information that exists primarily to serve as a backup repository to enable disaster recovery should it be necessary.

Confronted with the idea that data is a central asset to the business, companies have generally arranged backups in one of two ways, choosing between disk storage and tape storage. The interesting thing about this dichotomy is that neither solution fully addresses the real needs of businesses in the new millennium. Tape based backups are not flexible enough to be useful in many situations, and disk based solutions have fixed capacity limitations that can sometimes hinder business goals.

IT consulting firms can work closely with your business to identify solutions that fall outside the traditional tape-or-disk choice. A hybrid solution is often a better match for a company's true needs, and adding virtualized storage resources into the mix can provide even more flexibility and cost savings.